PM's senior news editor Joe Pappalardo traveled to South America last week to witness the launch of a satellite-carrying Ariane 5 rocket from a launch pad deep in the jungle of French Guiana.

7 Sights From a Jungle Spaceport Launch

7 Sights From a Jungle Spaceport Launch

There are places in the world that just belong on the cover of a science-fiction novel. Take, for example, the spaceport in French Guiana, where Arianespace regularly launches satellites into geosynchronous orbit.

You have all the imagery for a 1960s paperback—gleaming white rockets rising under bright plumes of flame and tearing away from the green depths of a primitive jungle, watched by a gallery of media moguls, sweat-soaked French Foreign Legionnaires, a multinational mélange of anxious engineers, and scores of locals who directly or indirectly depend on the success of the event.

It's not just their livelihoods at stake. From this spot I'm visiting at the north end of South America, more than half the world's satellites—communications, weather, scientific and surveillance—have blasted through the atmosphere to do their work above Earth (47 percent of American-owned sats have launched from French Guiana).

This, at heart, is simply a service industry. I try to elicit some deeper romanticism from Pierre-Francois Benaiteau, the genial but clear-eyed director of the Guiana Space Center. The paperback-cover shtick doesn't work on him. "I don't like science fiction," he says. Maybe he doesn't have to bother with fiction—from his office window he can see two rocket launchpads. Benaiteau has been at the spaceport for more than 20 years, watching it grow from an isolated facility with a single launch vehicle to a cornerstone of the space industry.

To understand how the spaceport works, think of it as an airport. The French government built this spaceport in the 1970s. Astrium built the Ariane 5 rocket. The customers supply the payloads. Arianespace is the airline that buys and operates the rockets, books the tickets, and supplies customer support (such as insurance and financing.) Only instead of passengers, what flies are satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Arianespace has been doing this longer and more regularly than any other company on the planet. Yet very few people actually stop to think about how satellites get up there. "When you say Guiana in Europe everyone thinks of Papillon, of the green hell," Benaiteau says, referring to the famous book and movie about the penal colonies located here. "No one is aware of our life here."

To give you a look inside, here's what we saw at the jungle spaceport during a July 5 launch of an Ariane 5.

Up Close with the Launch Vehicle

Up Close with the Launch Vehicle

It's impossible not to be impressed standing at the foot of a 193-foot-tall rocket, especially the day it launches into space in a burst of smoke and flame.

Like the space shuttle, the Ariane 5 rocket uses twin boosters that lift the craft off the pad, then fall away. The booster fuel is a fine powder of ammonia perchlorate, manufactured in French Guiana. (No port is eager to transit the powerful, explosive material in such vast quantities.) Fuel makes up 90 percent of the rocket's weight.

On the day before the launch, when this photo was taken, the pad is not as static as it appears. Deep booms rumble every couple of seconds as cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen boils off. There is a steady hiss of helium running through the fuel lines to keep them pressurized.

PM tours the pad with Clay Mowry, president of Arianespace's American subsidiary, and Charlie Ergen, the billionaire whose satellite is onboard. The two have known each other for years and are not above needling each other: "That helium is a rare commodity, but this close to the launch it has to run all the time," he says. Ergen turns his head. "So's that why these launches cost so damn much?"

Joking at the launch pad releases some of the tension—this is big stakes science. Ergen's is one of the biggest communications satellites ever launched, alone worth $350 million. A failure during launch could mean many months of delay. Furthermore, every second it stays on the ground, money it can be generating for the company is being lost. The meter is running.